įormer literature professor Harold Heft argued for Mosley's inclusion in the literary canon of Jewish-American writers. Mosley is on the board of the TransAfrica Forum. Mosley has served on the board of directors of the National Book Awards. The world premiere of Mosley's first play, The Fall of Heaven, was staged at the Playhouse in the Park, Cincinnati, Ohio, in January 2010. WALTR BOSLEY MOVIEHis first published book, Devil in a Blue Dress, was the basis of a 1995 movie starring Denzel Washington, and the following year a 10-part abridgement of the novel by Margaret Busby, read by Paul Winfield, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Mosley made publishing history in 1997 by foregoing an advance to give the manuscript of Gone Fishin' to a small, independent publisher, Black Classic Press in Baltimore, run by former Black Panther Paul Coates. Mosley's fame increased in 1992 when presidential candidate Bill Clinton, a fan of murder mysteries, named Mosley as one of his favorite authors. His direct inspirations include the detective fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Graham Greene and Raymond Chandler. His work has been translated into 21 languages. He has written in a variety of fiction categories, including mystery and afrofuturist science fiction, as well as nonfiction politics. Mosley started writing at 34 and claims to have written every day since, penning more than forty books and often publishing two books a year. Mosley says that he identifies as both African-American and Jewish, with strong feelings for both groups. One of his tutors there, Edna O'Brien, became a mentor and encouraged him, saying: "You're Black, Jewish, with a poor upbringing there are riches therein." While working for Mobil Oil, Mosley took a writing course at City College in Harlem after being inspired by Alice Walker's book The Color Purple. They separated 10 years later and were divorced in 2001. He moved to New York in 1981 and met the dancer and choreographer Joy Kellman, whom he married in 1987. Abandoning a doctorate in political theory, he started work programming computers. Mosley dropped out of Goddard College, a liberal arts college in Plainfield, Vermont, and then earned a political science degree at Johnson State College. He went through a "long-haired hippie" phase, drifting around Santa Cruz and Europe. He later became more highly politicised and outspoken about racial inequalities in the US, which are a context of much of his fiction. He was largely raised in a non-political family culture, although there were racial conflicts flaring throughout L.A. He also loves Langston Hughes and Gabriel García Márquez. His mother encouraged him to read European classics from Dickens and Zola to Camus. Mosley describes his father as a deep thinker and storyteller, a "black Socrates". He graduated from Alexander Hamilton High School in 1970. When he was 12, his parents moved from South Central to more comfortably affluent, working-class west LA. For $9.50 a week, Walter Mosley attended the Victory Baptist day school, a private African-American elementary school that held pioneering classes in black history. He was an only child and ascribes his writing imagination to "an emptiness in my childhood that I filled up with fantasies". His parents tried to marry in 1951 but, though the union was legal in California, where they were living, no one would give them a marriage license. He had worked as a clerk in the segregated US army during the Second World War. His father, Leroy Mosley (1924–1993), was an African American from Louisiana who was a supervising custodian at a Los Angeles public school. His mother, Ella (born Slatkin), was Jewish and worked as a personnel clerk her ancestors had immigrated from Russia. 4.5 Critical studies and reviews of Mosley's work.
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